Copenhagen flops, Evo is tops

Hey Barack, how’s it feel to get pwned by the Little Injun That Could?

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced today that a world conference of social movements is to take place in Bolivia, as a response to the failure of the 15th Summit on Climate Change, recently held in Copenhagen.

“The problems of climate change are directly linked to the irrational development of industry,” said the president at the celebrations for the 49th anniversary of the foundation of the Culpina municipality, in the region of Chuquisaca.

Morales said that he has requested technical and scientific arguments to support a large-scale international mobilization to defend the environment, especially water.

The meeting will take place on April 22, which is the International Day of Mother Earth.

“It will be a great meeting where we’ll be able to come up with solutions for the problem of climate change,” the leader said.

He regretted that the summit held in Copenhagen had concluded without reaching any important agreement. However, he noted that the event was an opportunity to break the hegemony of industrialized countries attending the gathering.

“If we don’t make important decisions now, our children and the generations to come will be faced with serious problems,” warned the president.

He pointed out that the Bolivian world conference of social movements will be aimed at finding options for guaranteeing food for the peoples, in view of the famine that is affecting different parts of the world.

Notice that this is not a summit of heads-of-state, who, as we’ve seen all too clearly from Copenhagen, are prostrate to moneyed interests and are thus in no position to take leadership on this key issue. Instead, Evo is calling for social movements and scientists from around the world to come together and come up with actual working solutions, not just more non-binding wimpy “agreements” that don’t even look good on paper.

And if you wonder why this was called by Evo and not, say, his bigger, louder pal Chavecito, consider one of the things he himself mentioned: water. It’s been a hot-button issue in Bolivia for many years now, and no wonder: first the moneyed interests (the same that are sitting on Washington’s neck right now) privatized Bolivia’s water, right down to the rain; then, a coalition of social movements, including the coca farmers led by Evo back when he was just a shit-disturbing union leader, booted Bechtel out of Bolivia (and their pal Goni the Gringo, too); and now, with global warming destroying the glaciers the indigenous people rely on for water, once more they can’t afford to take this life-sustaining resource for granted. (Remember, we’re talking about a landlocked country, and half of it is in the relatively arid Andes.)

Evo, who comes from the Altiplano himself, knows as well as anyone how precious water is in Bolivia; they can’t just pump it out of the sea, and they can’t rely on reservoirs because it doesn’t rain heavily enough to sustain them in all parts of the country. In the Altiplano, their lakes are fed by Andean glacial meltwater, and that source is rapidly draining away! So, now we understand Evo’s urgency on this matter, don’t we?

Looks like Evo is taking a leadership role yet again. Some people could learn a lot from this guy…and not just on how to dress, either.